Sun 2009-01-04 Two of my favorite blogs, Cosmic Variance and Overcoming Bias, have multiple authors. In both you have to scroll to the foot of a post to see who wrote it. This is unnecessarily annoying: the author's name should appear at the head of the posts in a multi-author blog.
Sun 2008-06-29 This evening I wanted to download the Blender Python API documentation onto my laptop so I could refer to it when I am not connected to the web. I knew that I could use the Linux command line program Wget to do this but it took me quite a bit of experimenting to get the right options. Initially I was just using the -r and -k options but Wget would go off and download pages from other web-sites. Eventually I discovered the -L option which restricts download to pages that are linked relative to the initial page. This did the job:
wget -rkL http://www.blender.org/documentation/245PythonDoc/frames.html
This left a directory structure named www.blender.org in my home directory and this structure contained correctly interlinked copies of the pages I needed. For more details on the Wget options see the Wget man page.
Sat 2008-05-10 
Yesterday, at work, I was creating a couple of structure diagrams for a document I was producing, and it occurred to me that it would be nice if there was a web-site you could go to to get palettes of colours that look good together. Well there is: COLOURlovers. It does for colour combinations s what Flickr does for photos.
Sun 2008-04-13 A few months ago, my greatest annoyance on the web was with the WordPress 'Snapshot' images that pop up when you mouse over links on certain blogs. I find it hard to fathom the mind of someone who obviously has the good taste to use WordPress, and yet enables such amateurish screen-junk.
However, my current annoyance is customer satisfaction survey pop-ups. These seem to have suddenly come into fashion on well-established commercial sites, even Microsoft who I would have thought would have known better. My first reaction on seeing one is to click the browser's 'Back' button to leave the site. This is maybe because I associate such pop-ups with malware.
Sun 2008-02-10 The operators of online games that are used by children go to great lengths to prevent their young players from swearing. However, these attempts are doomed when faced with the inventiveness of children when it comes to language. Last night, I looked over Zoe's shoulder as she was playing Runescape and noticed that every third word that she and her friends were saying was aids. She explained that as they weren't allowed to use proper swear words, and as AIDS was something bad, they used that instead.
Tristram Brelstaff
There is a good precendent for using the names of a disease as a swear word. Here is Paul Halmos talking about John von Neumann:
Once the telephone interrupted us when we were working in his office. His end of the conversation was very short; all he said between "Hello" and "Goodbye" was "Fekete pestis!", which means "Black plague!". Remembering, after he hung up, that I understood Hungarian, he turned to me, half apologetic and half exasperated, and explained that he wasn't speaking of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, but merely of some unexpected and unwanted dinner guests that his wife just told him about.
